Growing a health tech startup - bringing behaviour change design, to improve patient outcomes, save resources + secure NHS innovation funding
“National Health Service resources are under pressure from an ageing population. How can our startup team create integrated digital and physical care, to nudge patients with long term conditions to look after themselves better, reduce hospital admissions and free resource to invest elsewhere?”
Rich shaped the project with a health tech startup team - going on to lead a team of researchers, creative and business designers.
Designed for teenagers with long term health conditions that require careful nutrition, exercise and adherence to drug prescriptions, the startup solution brought together wearable tech to track habits, and app to record and nudge behaviour change, and the support of clinicians.
Demonstrating the importance of ethnographic research, of identifying patients’ real behaviour, the team spent time in patients’ families homes. People are notoriously poor at recalling what made them choose to behave a certain way, to pick a particular product or solution.
That’s likely to be especially true when it comes to our health, nutrition and taking medicine habits. So it was critical to introduce the value of observation - what people really do, not what they think they do - so that we can generate ideas for a better experience. What got in the way of good habits, and what might help to keep people on track?
It was quickly apparent that teenagers with potentially life-limiting conditions are still teenagers! So some are reluctant to follow the rules, to act now for longer term benefit. That adds extra stress to parents, who are already worried about their future.
Early ideas around an app with ‘good cop / bad cop’ coach characters were dismissed as ineffective by the psychology support we brought into the team. Instead, we were able to design for ‘positive days’ (do more) and ‘reluctant days’ (do the minimum).
Together, we developed a combined app, device and patient family support system prototype, drawing on behavioural science insights. This startup concept then successfully secured NHS innovation funding, so that it could begin early testing with patients, ahead of a full clinical trial with evidence of efficacy and value for money.
behavioural insight + behavioural change design skills
connected health
product + service design